Why British queens are the best film stars

The Queen’s dramatic entry into action cinema may have simply been a stunt to
open the London 2012 Olympic Games, but it also marked the culmination of a
fascinating history of monarchs on screen, writes Professor Mandy Merck.

A still taken from footage used at the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games starring James Bond actor Daniel Craig escorting the Queen through the corridors of Buckingham PalacePhoto: AFP/Getty Images

The portrayal of queens in TV and film has changed dramatically over the years, with moving images of the British monarchy, in fact and fiction, almost as old as the moving image itself. This fascinating history is being discussed and analysed over the next two days at a conference in London, entitled: The British Monarchy on Screen, which I had the pleasure of organising.

From early examples it is easy to perceive the appeal of royal movies – costume, carriages and celebration vie with martial display, violence and death. And the prominence of Britain’s queens, from the Celtic Boudica to the current monarch, played by Dame Helen Mirren in The Queen (2006), offer plentiful leading roles to women. Paradoxically, monarchy movies also offer rare opportunities for women to play powerful political figures.

Actors dressed to resemble Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and James Bond parachute into the stadium during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games

In 1896, Queen Victoria started a long tradition of using new media to be more accessible to the public when she was filmed at Balmoral riding in a horse drawn chaise, led by a Highlander. Queen Victoria’s last years were repeatedly filmed, in a procession to the May 1897 opening of Sheffield’s Town Hall, and in a much grander parade through the streets of London to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee a month later.

By her death in January 1901, the commercial value of this fascinating footage had become apparent and several film companies took up positions along the route of her funeral procession, along which Queen Victoria’s crowned coffin was born on a gun carriage to the Albert Memorial Chapel.

Related Articles

Elizabeth I, and her father Henry VIII, are the two biggest stars of the English monarchy, with the latter portrayed on numerous occasions in films such as The Private Life of Henry VIII, in 1933, and A Man For All Seasons, in 1966. But Good Queen Bess must take the honours for the number of her portrayals, from girlhood to old age. More recent movies include Elizabeth (1998), starring Cate Blanchett, and its 2007 sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Cate Blanchett played Queen Elizabeth I in the movie Elizabeth

Quentin Crisp’s casting in the adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s transgender fantasy Orlando (1992) highlights the unusual sexual dynamics in these royal studies. The monarch of costume drama is often masculine in worldly power, but feminine in spectacular display. In kings this combination of gendered traits leads logically to the playboy Henry VIII or the homosexual Edward II in the 1991 film directed by Derek Jarman. In queens, it often culminates in the figure of the diva who dominates by her theatricality, albeit a theatricality which is sometimes exposed.

More contemporary is Stephen Frears’ The Queen – our current monarch is portrayed as conscientious, businesslike and torn in true melodramatic style between public duty and personal reserve. Reminiscent of Dame Helen’s police detective in Prime Suspect, hers is a no-nonsense monarch who wears a headscarf rather than a crown. So successful did this Oscar-winning persona become, that it is now scheduled for a February stage revival in Peter Morgan’s new play The Audience, with Dame Helen again taking the regal role, this time with some of the dozen Prime Ministers the Queen has advised across her reign.

Dame Helen Mirren won critical acclaim for her portrayal of the monarch in 'The Queen

Frears’ The Queen hit climaxes with the monarchs’ speech broadcast to the nation, an acknowledgement of the increasing importance of the mass media to royal authority. As biographer William Shawcross wrote of The Queen’s portrayal of the royal family’s reaction to the death of Diana in 1997: “Since the film was released she has had many more letters, some of the writers saying that before the film they had never quite understood what she had been through, others saying how glad they were that the film had finally tried to tell the truth they had always accepted.”

Reportedly delivered in one take, the Queen’s ‘Good evening, Mr. Bond’ was itself a sly reference to the historical interchange between motion pictures and the palace. For a reserved woman who had complained as a young princess in 1936 of ‘those awful lights’ when being photographed, the Queen’s submission to movie bondage was a milestone in her negotiation with the mass media.

A still taken from footage used at the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games

Her model was of course ‘M’, Bond’s boss in the film series, who has been played since 1995’s Golden Eye by Dame Judi Dench. In 1998 Dame Judi also played, in Mrs. Brown, the Queen’s great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, and in 1997 her namesake, Elizabeth I, in Shakespeare in Love. A case of reality, imitating art, imitating reality, in the manner of British screen monarchs. With recent figures showing that the Duchess of Cambridge is the most visible woman in British newspapers, the appeal of royal portrayals on TV and in film is set to continue.